Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian was ExtremeTech's senior editor from 2011 through the end of 2014. He wrote about everything from brain implants to the latest computer chips, from society's servitude to electricity to the impending arrival of the technological singularity.

The last few years have been very kind to electric cars, mostly thanks to the ice-breaking carried out by the Toyota Prius hybrid, and then the runaway success of Tesla’s Model S. Despite their surge in popularity, however, one question has never really been answered properly: What exactly is the range of an electric vehicle? Is it really 350 miles as Tesla claims, or is that some kind of miraculous edge-case that can only be obtained if you’re coasting down hill with the windows closed on a sunny day?

Next week, at CES 2015, LG will introduce what it calls the world’s first ultra-wide (21:9) gaming monitor with AMD’s FreeSync technology — AMD’s alternative to Nvidia’s proprietary and expensive G-Sync. I say ‘world’s first,’ but considering LG hasn’t yet released the monitor, nor given us an expected release date or price, that seems a little bit rich.

It’s almost 18 years since IBM’s Deep Blue famously beat Garry Kasparov at chess, becoming the first computer to defeat a human world champion. Since then, as you can probably imagine, computers have firmly cemented their lead over puny, fallible meatbags. Today, following the completion of TCEC Season 7, we have a new computer chess world champion called Komodo.

Two and a half days ago, at around 6:15am local time on December 28, AirAsia flight 8501 (QZ8501) disappeared en route from Indonesia to Singapore. There were 162 passengers and crew on-board, and no survivors have yet been found at the plane’s crash site in the Java Sea. Why, in 2014, can we still lose vehicles that are responsible shuttling millions of passengers across the skies every day? Why don’t we have real-time tracking of aircraft?

According to a few sources from within Microsoft, it appears that the company is working on a new web browser — codenamed Spartan — that will debut with Windows 10. Spartan will reportedly look like a mix of Firefox and Chrome, with tabs above the address bar — and, perhaps most excitingly, Spartan will apparently support real browser extensions. (Extensions/add-ons in current versions of Internet Explorer are a bit of a joke.)

A member of the Chaos Computer Club has shown that it’s possible to reproduce someone’s fingerprint, and thus break into systems protected by biometric fingerprint scanners, using just a photo of someone’s finger. In this case, the member of the CCC managed to get the fingerprint of Germany’s defense minister Ursula von der Leyen from a photo taken a press conference — which, if the German government uses biometric access control systems, could be a bit of a security breach.

It is exceedingly hard to find an angle that presents The Interview in a positive light — and yet, of course, Sony Pictures’ marketing department has managed to do just that. Yesterday, four days after the film’s release on YouTube, Google Play Movies, and Xbox Video, The Interview became Sony’s ‘#1 online film of all time,’ grossing $15 million from sales and rentals. In other news, however, it would appear, rather ironically, that Sony used a popular K-pop song without permission of artist.

After years of relentless litigation, it seems the mobile/smartphone patent war might be drawing to a close. Rockstar, a patent trolling company owned by Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Ericsson, and BlackBerry, has agreed to cancel the lawsuits it had filed against Google and most Android device makers. This follows on from news this summer that Apple and Google had agreed to drop all lawsuits between the two companies, and Apple and Samsung agreed to drop all lawsuits outside the US.

What has a beautiful transparent-gold chassis, a fairly big screen, decent innards, and almost no chance of getting you to switch from your Apple or Android smartphone? The new Fx0, made by LG, which runs Firefox OS.

Apple has pushed out its first ever automatic security update to Mac OS X users, fixing a vulnerability in NTP that would’ve allowed hackers to turn Macs into DDoS zombies. In some ways, this finally brings Apple up to parity with Microsoft: Windows has technically had the ability to do automatic updates for a long time. Rather impressively, the OS X security patch should install transparently, with no need to restart.

Google has unveiled the first fully working road-legal prototype of its self-driving car. If all goes to plan, Google hopes to partner with a real car maker to bring a self-driving vehicle to market in the next five years. Whether the commercialized driverless car will look like the overly cutesy Google prototype remains to be seen.